Month: January 2019

Having sat down with groups who have clinically diagnosed depression or bipolar-II, it seems there’s one thing you can talk about with them all that they all seem to agree about, pretty much every time.

Sometimes it brings a smile, or laughs of acknowledgement.

The conversation goes something like this…

We. Are good at worrying. In fact, I don’t just mean good at worrying, no, I mean that when it comes to worrying we are truly gifted, and quite exceptionally good at it. How good at it? I mean, seriously good. Other people might think they’re good at worrying, but they are nowhere near as good at it as us.

When it comes to worrying each of us will probably say we’re about as good at worrying as you can get. We do it more than anyone else, and we do it better than anyone else. Most of us would find it hard to even entertain the fact that anyone could be better at it, because, hey, they’re just not, ok.

We can also do it for longer than anyone else, and we can do it more intensely than anyone else, and when someone else might give up worrying because they just haven’t got the skills, we won’t. We’re the best.

Usain Bolt is seriously, incredibly good at running. Let’s face it, it would be very surprising if his name didn’t come up if someone was asked “who’s the best in the world at running?”.

…well, we are the Usain Bolts of worrying.

Isn’t that great? We’re truly good at something!!! Get in!

Now, all that might have sounded like a joke, albeit a very true joke, but it actually is fundamentally a very important observation that informs the designing of a new approach to improving mental health that can really work. It might not make sense yet, and there’s a lot more to talk about. But for now, one thing is clear as day as I am sure you’ll agree; that we’re all incredibly gifted in this field, just like Usain Bolt is in his.

If you’re on board with that, you’re going to like this blog and what it has to say.

In the next blog post, we’re going to talk about the “1000mph question” that’s never asked by mental health professionals, and why it’s so incredible that they don’t ask it, and that they haven’t even worked out that it is a question that they need to ask!

It’s all a bit passive, a bit ‘meh’ isn’t it?

Most counselling doesn’t exactly grab the bull by the horns get right to the point, acting on the very things that are going to help. Not least because it has to establish what is going to help, because it doesn’t have a definitive “do this”.

What most people with depression who don’t feel counselling works seem to say, is that the counsellor talks with you, and identifies with you a type of situation you tend to say you find difficult, then the magic bean comes out: “So the next time you feel X, why don’t you try thinking of it like Y instead?”.

How wishy washy does that sound, it’s all a bit limp sounding isn’t it? Well, yes, it is, and that’s why in the next moment you feel crushed by your emotions and the weight of depression, the chances you will (or it would ever occur to you to) “think Y instead” are very small indeed. Why? Well, what chance has a rational little exploratory thought got against the tidal wave of irrational thoughts that are collapsing over you? Exactly, not a lot.

In the 1980s there was a band called Wet Wet Wet, now I don’t think they got their name from being counsellors but it’s almost as if they could have done.

There are some interesting underlying concepts going on in counselling though, informing some of the principles of counselling techniques. Let’s actually look at one of those concepts here for a moment, rather than a specific counselling technique.

So, an important underpinning observation of CBT is the following triangle…

Now, it may just look like a boring and overly simple diagram, but it actually is extremely valuable for sufferers of depression to grasp.

It is quite obvious what THOUGHTS represent, and in this diagram it represents what you are consciously thinking or what you could be thinking as the result of something else.

FEELINGS is just that, how you are feeling, think of it in terms of ‘ok’, ‘bad’, ‘awful’.

The more complex one here is ENVIRONMENT, it represents more, it could be the room you are in, the job you have, your bank account, the clutter you haven’t cleaned up, the jobs you haven’t done, the state of a personal relationship. Think of it more like the things that other people could easily understand, as we all have a lay of the land of our life in any one moment.

The trick in the triangle is to look at the interconnecting lines, because they represent which things can AFFECT something else.

Some examples would be, if you FEEL really down, then you might have THOUGHTS that something in life is not worth it. Going the other way on that very same line, you might be thinking of something that is a bit overwhelming or daunting, and as a result your FEELINGS are affected.

Your ENVIRONMENT might be affected by you FEELING down as you might not clean your house for months. The other way on that line could simply be that a personal relationship breaks down (ENVIRONMENT) and of course your FEELINGS are affected. In fact, that’s a really good example of something that would affect down two of the lines as your THOUGHTS will change too.

You should be able to think of loads of examples of AFFECTS happening within this diagram.

Now, why this diagram is so valuable is that it makes perfect logical sense, and not just for those who suffer from depression, it works for everyone. That, is important as it is can help to rationalise some of the ways you feel if you do suffer from depression, it shows triggers and effects.

If you refer to this diagram, simply by remembering it, you will have a tool that can help you often in concluding “ah, I can see why I feel like this”. If that helps you rationalise just one bad spot and it eases it, or nips it in the bud, it’s been worth you absorbing this.

Of course, a depressed person who is affected by their feelings and thoughts, much of the time is amplifying to the extreme the very things that a person who doesn’t suffer from depression simply doesn’t amplify.

In the next post we’re going to look at this amplification, and it’s going to involve the one and only Usain Bolt !! 🙂

Some people, in fact a huge amount of people, will tell you that for them, counselling doesn’t work.

** This doesn’t mean by the way if you haven’t tried counselling that you shouldn’t, far from it, some counselling is certainly among the most effective means we have to combat depression **

Come on though, why do so many people say so definitively that counselling does not work for them then?

The answer is actually somewhat quite simple. First off, counselling is as we know, a very scant resource. This means at best in the UK, someone referred to mental health services might (and this is a big might), be lucky to get some sort of regular counselling for a while. So, for the sake of argument, let’s say best case you might end up getting one hour of counselling, a week, for a few months.

At this point I can hear many people saying “yeah right, you’ll be lucky to get that!”, and unfortunately they’d be completely correct. BUT, even if you could get that amount and regularity of counselling, will it really help you? Well, what are they going to have to achieve during this short amount of contact with you is certainly a lot!

Let’s list a few things that this counselling will have to aim to achieve if it’s going to work…

• First it is going to need trust and comfort to build up between you and the counsellor. Let’s face it, this can take a while. Some of us are very reluctant to open up.
• It’s going to need to be engaging, to hold your attention, and to peak your interest, to get you invested in it.
• It’s going to need to someone to establish how you experience life, how things change through time for you, what’s worked and not worked for you, to get a reasonably good picture of your situation.
• It’s going to have you buy into it even to have a chance.
• It will mean spending each of the hour long sessions going over what’s happened since the last hour session, as well as reviewing how any suggestions from the week before have gone, so that’s more time gone.
• It’s going to have to provide solutions that work, that you can feel the results of, otherwise you’ll dismiss it and become unengaged.
• It’s going to have to work whatever you feel like each week, the timing of sessions might not suit you, perhaps you’re not in the mood at the time, coinciding with a time when you’re not receptive, preoccupied, too stressed.
• …it has got a hell of a lot to achieve, and the odds are stacked against it…

So, counselling has got a lot to achieve in that one hour a week hasn’t it? …and in the end, what is its goal anyway? It won’t be what you might like in an ideal world which would be for it to rid you of depression.

When you ask people who have decided counselling didn’t work for them you’ll hear a lot of “well, it sort of helped, but not really” and “it didn’t really fix anything”. Why would they say this? Probably because they are simply being honest.

Depression is an intense experience right? It can be utterly consuming, eating every second of your waking hours, and when you compare this to the one hour that you get with a counsellor it is obvious that the counselling experience for many seems like a ‘sticky plaster’, which whilst it might be a nice sticky plaster (yes, it can be good just to talk) it so often turns out at best a sticky plaster that falls off a little while after you leave.

The odds against counselling working are so high, due to its scant resource, will always be a primary reason why it does not work for so many people, and this is way way way more of a reason than any of the actual content delivered during the counselling, some of which can be very useful, there’s no guarantee that even this won’t be missed due to the delivery of a particular counsellor.

There’s good news though, as there are other ways forward.

In the next post… we’ll look at the content delivered in the counselling, and some of the genuinely valuable principles of common counselling like CBT. (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). We’ll begin to shed some light on what can potentially work very well indeed, which doesn’t dismiss some of the sound principles, but builds on them, picking things that work.

After years of reading through the minefield of information you can find on depression, looking for solutions for it, looking for help …the journey is complete, and yet the route to being depression free was not found written anywhere.

Welcome, …to DeDepression.com

…the story will be told here.